In Afghanistan, Warily Watching the U.S. and Fearing Abandonment

By Michael Hirsh

Many Afghans worry that American policy will once again give up on their country.

Two boys in the Afghan village of Zana Khan. / Michael Hirsh

KABUL, Afghanistan--Mohammad Masoom Stanekzai limped into the room on a
cane and sat down with a smile. We inquired about his health. "I am
under repair," he said. "It will never be the way it used to be."
Stanekzai, the Cambridge University-educated head of the Afghanistan
Peace and Reconciliation Program, was in this same room last September,
in the sprawling home of former Afghan President Burhanuddin
Rabbani, when a Taliban pretending to be interested in peace talks
arrived. The Taliban had a bomb concealed in his turban and promptly
blew himself up. Rabbani, the head of the government's peace talk
efforts, was killed. Stanekzai was badly wounded.

On Thursday, in a
meeting with visiting reporters, Stanekzai sat across from Rabbani's
eldest son, Salahuddin, an earnest, English-speaking young man like so
many of the elite young men here--more than two-thirds of Afghanistan's
population is under 25--whom President Hamid Karzai appointed last month
to succeed his father as chairman of the 70-member High Peace Council.
The appointment was a message to everyone, but especially to the
Taliban: We're not stopping. You can't kill us before we kill the worst
of you and reconcile the rest to coming home. We will outlast you.

Afghanistan,
like Masoom Stanekzai, may never be fully repaired. But if you were
inclined to bet money on the fate of nations, the sounder gamble would
probably be on men like Stanekzai and young Rabbani, who is 41 and holds
a master's degree from Columbia University. True, Afghanistan is going
to be a bloody mess for a long time, maybe decades. But what cynics fail
to understand is that it is usually only when backward countries are
completely abandoned by the international community that the bad guys
win. And it is now clear beyond any reasonable doubt that whoever is
elected U.S. president in November, Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, the
U.S. and international community are going to remain here in a fairly
robust way, if not with a large-scale troop presence.

As a result,
the mood is "shifting," Stanekzai says hopefully. The psychology has
changed in recent weeks with the news of U.S. and Western commitments:
first, with Obama's announcement of a 10-year strategic partnership
agreement running to 2024; then, in two weeks, with the NATO summit in
Chicago that is expected to elicit money for long-term funding of Afghan
security forces; and, finally, with the Tokyo conference on economic
development plans scheduled for July, when Afghanistan will present its
"strategic vision," according to Finance Minister Omar Zakhilwal.

Nothing
tells that story of hope better than the real-estate market here, notes
Nader Nadery, Afghanistan's feisty human-rights commissioner. When
Obama frightened Afghans with his announcement that American soldiers
would be coming home by 2014, housing prices plummeted, from $200,000
for 100 square meters to $80,000. People and money were fleeing. But in
the four days after Obama's speech in Kabul last week announcing the
strategic partnership, "prices jumped back up to $120,000," Nadery said.

Only
this week, 10 more Taliban surrendered in northern Kunduz province,
saying they wanted to come home. About 4,000 have formally done so
nationwide, although most are in the north and west, where they and
their families are not likely to be as threatened by Taliban
retaliation. Although he was nearly killed by a fanatic, Stanekzai says
he still hopes the Taliban leadership will see reason.

Many young
Afghans fear and mistrust this reconciliation process; they fear that
even if the Taliban agree to lay down their arms, they will undermine
the government politically. Above all, the Afghans are terrified of
abandonment by the U.S., which happened twice with horrific results. It
occurred first in 1989, when President George H.W. Bush turned his back
after the mujahadeen forced a Soviet withdrawal; and then again in 2002,
when Bush's son, George W., turned his attention and resources to Iraq
while the Taliban quietly regrouped. (Even though the younger Bush had
declared, in a speech in October 2001 after attacking Afghanistan, that
the United States "should learn a lesson from the previous engagement ...
that we should not just simply leave after a military objective has been
achieved.")

Abandoment is
a national trauma here, like Hiroshima to the Japanese or 9/11 to
us. Today, once again, Afghans know their nation is in a desperate race
with America's patience: A recent AP poll, released Wednesday, shows
levels of support for the war in Afghanistan now on par with Vietnam in
the 1970s, with only 27 percent of Americans in favor of continuing it
and 66 percent opposing. Back in Washington the debate is all about
"Afghan good enough," CIA Director David Petraeus's tart phrase for
minimal expectations. The threshold of "success" is now so low now that
anything less than another Taliban takeover will be fine with most
American policymakers.

The Afghans I spoke to understand all this;
they meticulously track every step of the debate in Washington. At
dinner on my final night in Kabul, Nadery noted to me, very worried,
"Obama has dropped the words 'democracy' and 'human rights' entirely
when he talks about Afghanistan." I told him he was probably right: It's
because U.S. policymakers, the president included, still are not
terribly keen to nation-build; they just want an honorable way out. He
said, "You know, whatever is said in Washington is automatically
translated into policy here in Kabul." In other words, the moment Obama
stops talking about human rights, all the warlords and other bad guys
start thinking they can get away with more mischief, and the good
Afghans duck into a crouch because they fear they've lost their only
protector. "I think the 2014 withdrawal is premature," Safia Siddiqi, a
former member of parliament, said on Thursday, echoing what others say.

But what is being pledged now may be just enough. As we've
learned so many times over the decades, the permanent presence of the
international community can fundamentally alter the equation; it can
overturn the iron law of history that seems to doom backward countries
like Afghanistan to ever-more war and repression. We saw it in Bosnia,
when everyone expected the 1995 Dayton Accord to fall apart and the
ethnic killing to resume (it didn't, because NATO stayed); we saw it in
Kosovo, which gained its independence under NATO monitoring; we saw it
in the ultimate impact that the 1975 Helsinki Final Act had in
undermining the illegitimate Communist regimes in the Soviet bloc. In
the end, Moscow's reluctant agreement to sign onto vague promises of
"human rights and fundamental freedoms" inspired "Helsinki monitoring
groups" in East-bloc countries. Those in turn helped to engender the
dissident movements that blossomed in the 1980s and eventually shattered
the Soviet empire.

Yet there is also some evidence that a few
senior U.S. officials understand this finally, and will continue to
pressure Karzai's government to make human rights and democracy a
contingency for aid. "Hillary Clinton gets it," one International
Security Assistance Force official told me. "Watch what she does at the
NATO summit."

We will be watching. So will Salahuddin Rabbani. So will Massom Stanekzai, cane in hand.